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Category: Universities

New Enrolment Data. 2017-18. Finally.

Morning all.  There is finally enrolment data from October 2017 for the 2017-18 year.  Praise be StatsCan.  (Some of you think I am a bit hard on the people from Tunney’s Pasture.  Let’s be clear: much of the reason it takes StatsCan so long to put data together is because it takes institutions – particularly community colleges – a long time to compile and submit the data.  My understanding is that part of the reason this year’s release is a couple of years late

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February 20, 2020 No Comments

Administrative Bloat, 2020, Part II

After publishing yesterday’s piece, in which I updated a 5-year-old data analysis on spending on academic vs. non-academic salaries, I got a burst of unwarranted optimism and decided to try to do the same thing with another five year-old analysis on the same topic using institutional data – or at least institutional data from the dozen or so institutions who bother to publish this stuff.  Sounds simple, right?  I mean, if they published data before, they must publish it now, right?  How tough

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February 19, 2020 No Comments

Administrative Bloat, 2020 Edition

Let’s take a look at administrative bloat.  It’s been about four and a half years since we last did it: time for another look. Now, the typical story we hear about administrative bloat concerns the huge numbers of administrative and support staff (henceforth, “A&S Staff”) hired, in contrast to the ranks of the professoriate, which are constantly decimated by predatory managers and yadda yadda.  The second part of that is reasonably easy to de-bunk, as Statistics Canada actually publishes data

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February 18, 2020 2 Comments

A Closer Look at Gender Pay Gaps

Picking up on yesterday’s blog, let’s look more closely at the data on university gender and pay. In particular, we need to look at the underlying factors that cause pay disparities. Years of service is the most obvious single factor affecting average pay. Figure 1 shows the women’s share of the professoriate, by age.  Overall, 41% of the professoriate are women, but it skews much higher among younger (less well-paid) professors and much lower among older (more highly-paid) ones.  Figure 1:

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February 6, 2020 No Comments

More Fun with Faculty Salary Data

Morning all.  Yesterday I promised you more faculty data analysis, and I am going to start by looking at variation in pay by institution.  I’m going to be deliberately provocative by showing people the distribution of salaries at the level where they vary the most: full professorships.  Ready? Figure 1: Average Salaries of Full Professors by Institution (and yes, the X-axis is unreadable, do you know how many institutions there are in this country?), Canada, 2018-19 The point I want to underline

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February 5, 2020 2 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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